Upper El may be on their field trip, but that doesn't mean nothing's happened this week!
Last week, students finished writing their latest short stories, and we finished our Evolution project! I hope you enjoy their creations as much as they did making them. We have striped elephants, duck-footed crocodiles, big eyes, long legs, and strong tails. That just names a few of the mutations that made their animals change and morph through natural selection.
On Monday, I introduced our next Engineering project. The assignment is to get a ping-pong ball from point A to point B, two feet away. Sounds simple enough, right?
We spoke about energy and how the ball needs to gain energy to move over any distance. That's part one of this project: to design a mechanism to launch your ball. Students can't use their hands to propel the ball forward, but they can lift it and place it into their design.
Then, the ball needs to stop at point B, so students need to contemplate how they will control the speed. Finally, to make things harder, once everyone has come up with a design, Mr. Derek will introduce an unknown obstacle between points A and B. They'll then have time to make any necessary alterations to their design to accomplish the task.
Students are off and building some amazing things already. This is going to be fun!
We spent our last day this week (Tuesday), working for half our time on our projects and then ended with a trip to the woods to sketch and document more plants for our "field notes." Then, we had a little fun on the rope swing : )
I look forward to hearing how their trip to the beach went!